Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work

In this overview of Whitman's life and work, Folsom and Price make the following comments about the poet's connection to Pfaff's: "At Pfaff's, Whitman the former temperance writer began a couple of years of unemployed carousing; he was clearly remaking his image, going to bars more often than he had since he left New Orleans a decade earlier. At Pfaff's, he mingled with figures like Henry Clapp, the influential editor of the anti-establishment Saturday Press. . . . Whitman also became friends with many writers, some well known at the time: Ada Clare, Fitz-James O'Brien, George Arnold, and Edmund Clarence Stedman. It was here, too, that a young William Dean Howells met Whitman" (61).